Design Thinking

Design Thinking
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

Design Thinking
Design thinking refers to an iterative process that seeks to comprehend users’ needs, redefine problems, and challenge assumptions to come up with innovative solutions. In particular, it improves the usefulness and creativity of solutions. One of the primary issues that hinder team members from solving a specific problem is the lack of considering the people affected. However, design thinking is user-centered, and it facilitates the development of a solution to a particular problem from users’ perspectives. For this reason, it defines the issue, empathize, ideate, test, and implement a prototype. Currently, the world is increasingly becoming complex and interconnected, which makes it difficult to act on the rapidly changing environment. Design thinking provides a means of solving various problems in a human-centric manner. Indeed, it facilitates the implementation of the most appropriate and innovative solutions that are user-centered.
Jeanne Liedtka came up with five critical observations about design thinking. First, teams become focused on a qualitative understanding of the user context. They prioritize users’ needs in mind, which enables them to understand the problem appropriately. Teams do not only comprehend the issue deeply, but they develop a personal connection with users that facilitate the innovation process. Design thinking fosters human-centered activities that give valuable data, which is used in the ideation process. For this reason, innovators get a deep insight into the issue at hand that enables them to develop high-quality solutions (Liedtka, 2017). They also reframe the existing problem and broaden its scope. Notably, problem exploration occurs before the ideation process. The new understanding, which emanates from exploratory researches, enables innovators to consider various things that help in addressing issues that might arise in the future.
Second, design thinking enforces team heterogeneity. In other words, it brings different groups of people together who educate one another and share their ideas to produce systemic possibilities. Diverse teams create bonds that enable them to work in close collaboration and use local capabilities to address future issues. Heterogeneous groups provide creative solutions, and they pool resources together to enhance the innovation process. As such, team members put their differences aside and focus on things that help them to get the most appropriate solution. Third, design thinking cultivates dialogue-based conversations, which act as the building block in which innovation teams operate. Real-time conversation builds trust and engagement and facilitates the emergence of new possibilities and proper solutions (Liedtka, 2017). In addition, thinking together enables individuals to act as a team. “Thinking together” requires mutual en...